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Lorenzo Bavasso, Data and AI Director – Digital, BT Business

Lorenzo Bavasso, Data and AI Director – Digital, BT Business

Describe your career to date

I am an executive with a background in engineering and technology, with a unique blend of business and technical expertise. A decade of consulting experience at Accenture, followed by leadership roles in Vodafone, Three and Hutch Group, and BT, has given me a deep understanding of how to leverage technology to drive business results.

I have led multi-country big data strategies, built data and artificial intelligence (AI) cloud platforms, and harnessed Telecommunication data to serve other industries such as transport, retail, energy and utilities and ad-tech. My role in BT started in the Global Business team to define the data and AI strategy, to start building the foundations to extract value from the ground up, and to extend the strategy to the wider BT business when the Global and Enterprise unities came together.

I now lead a team of 400+ data and AI professionals across different countries, accountable for our foundations, data governance, and management and for all our data and AI products.

We are now completing our cloud migration which is delivering significant value above target, improving operations and customer interactions. We are also working on generative AI features for our employees, customers, and company. My career in technology, innovation, and big transformations has enabled me to land AI where it matters: focused, at scale, and taking us to our future state.

Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?

We take data literacy very seriously and we have started our transformation journey together with a cultural shift and skill uplifting programme that is aimed for data and AI teams and a relevant number of personas across the business. We created a very diverse offering of learning programmes, certifications, inductions to fit different needs, and profiles. Our programme comprised deep training programmes for engineers and data scientists through our Digital Campus, certifications for leaders and lighter learning paths for all our employees.

The objective is to make everyone a data citizen and to make data everyone’s core business. With the rise of generative AI, this is even more important because now AI talks human language and available for everyone to consume; this does not come without risk. It also does not mean the importance of high-quality secure data is decreasing; in fact, the opposite is true. We have setup an engagement team to help identify new opportunities and also created a code of conduct for everyone to refer to. We want to encourage experimentation, but also keep our data and customer data safe. We are acting advisors to our diverse customer community and sharing our views and guiding them based on our experience and sharing our learnings. As a result of these successful programmes, we are above the industry standard in our data management maturity, with a data savvy workforce, and a collective ambition to think AI-first to reach our future state.

How are you preparing your organisation for AI adoption and change management?

At BT we are now in a phase of scaled AI adoption across the business. We now drive real value in different areas of the business – from service to sales and marketing to our internal processes and operations. In financial terms, we are ahead of plan to reach our £0.5bn value target by 2026. We made tangible progress in the last two years, building the foundation to run AI effectively.

Our Google Cloud platform contains now most of our critical data, we have released our first data fabric solution to ensure data moves safely across platforms, and the right policies are applied in real time. We have created an AI framework to productise models in days versus months, and we are now evolving all this technology to do more. We are setting up to use large language models – with a couple that are already live – that will be fully integrated with our strategic IT stack. While setting the foundations, we took on a few key use cases to prove the value AI can bring and inspire the business to do more.

More importantly, we are shifting to a product-led approach, where we do not just implement solution for our business, but we truly treat them as products, tracking the value they create, their performances, and driving adoption. We also have some products that our customers are adopting because of their uniqueness and innovation (one winner and one shortlisted at the DataIQ Awards) There is a lot to do, but the business appetite and ambition for AI shifted significantly and this is key for scaling it properly.

However, there is a catch: never lower the guard on how you manage your data. AI needs good data, and to keep it good it is hard work. Especially in a business that is constantly transforming.

Lorenzo Bavasso
has been included in:

100 Brands 2020 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2021 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2022 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

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